Ayutthaya, founded by tradition in 1350 on an island where three rivers meet, was for four centuries the capital of Siam and one of the great cities of Asia: a cosmopolitan port where Chinese, Persian, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, and French quarters ringed a core of gilded temple spires. Seventeenth-century European visitors ranked its size and splendour with the largest cities they knew; its kings exchanged embassies with Versailles.
Its nemesis was dynastic energy next door. Burma’s new Konbaung dynasty, having reunified its own wars, turned east. A first siege in 1760 broke off when the Burmese king was fatally injured — by most accounts through the bursting of one of his own siege guns. His successor Hsinbyushin sent two armies in 1765 with instructions and patience: they ground down the outlying towns, converged on the capital, and — defeating the annual hope that the monsoon floods would force withdrawal — built up their camps, boated their operations, and kept the siege through the high water.
7 April 1767
After fourteen months, with famine and fire inside the walls (a blaze during the siege reportedly destroyed thousands of houses) and relief armies beaten away, the Burmese stormed the city on 7 April 1767 and gave it a sack of annihilation: palaces and temples burned, Buddha images stripped of gold and broken open — the fires melting the gold off the great images — libraries and royal archives destroyed, which is why early Siamese history must be partly reconstructed from foreign records. The king died in the chaos — by tradition starving in flight days later; tens of thousands were marched to Burma as captives, the royal family among them, alongside the artisans, dancers, and scholars a victorious court customarily harvested. The city of perhaps a million in its greater orbit was left, in the chronicle phrase, to the dogs and the crows.
The victory evaporated almost at once: China invaded Burma that year, and Hsinbyushin recalled his armies to fight four brutal defensive wars, leaving no occupation force in Siam.
Taksin and the road to Bangkok
Into the vacuum drove a half-Chinese provincial governor, Taksin, who had broken out of the doomed city with a few hundred men before the fall. Within months he had a base, a fleet, and momentum; within a year he had beaten the rival warlords and been crowned — not at Ayutthaya, which he judged ruined beyond defence, but downstream at Thonburi, nearer the sea and the Chinese rice trade. Taksin’s reign ended in 1782 with his deposition and execution — madness is the chronicle’s claim, politics the likelier one — and his general took the throne as Rama I, moving the capital across the river to a village called Bangkok. The dynasty he founded still reigns.
Ayutthaya was quarried for brick to build the new capital, and never resettled as more than a provincial town. Its headless Buddhas and burnt prangs — one stone Buddha head famously locked in a strangler fig’s roots — are a UNESCO site and a national wound: Thai memory of 1767 remains a live nerve in relations with Burma to this day.